


Brook No Repudiation

by northwest_southwest_central



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24355036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northwest_southwest_central/pseuds/northwest_southwest_central
Summary: Marianne sees Dimitri's scars for the first time.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Marianne von Edmund
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	Brook No Repudiation

**Author's Note:**

> CW: self-harm, violence, read the tags

It is the peak of summer, and Marianne is sweating like there is no escape.

This month’s House vs. House tournament is a test of the lance, and, as predicted, the Blue Lions take the tournament with ease. Prince Dimitri uses textbook-perfect technique where he can and brute force where he cannot. As the victor, he celebrates standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his classmates, his childhood friends one and the same, and smiles modestly while dripping with sweat.

“How does he fight while wearing that?” Hilda complains next to her, and wipes the sweat from her own brow. “I’m sweating just sitting here, and he’s still got his little cape on. It just doesn’t make sense!”

It’s a fair point. Prince Dimitri still wears the armored uniform he was fighting in, long sleeves and dress pants and all, and is obviously overheating; his friends are dressed in much more sensible single layers. Somewhere from the crowd, a daring female voice calls out, and Sylvain, grinning, rises to the challenge and peels off his damp shirt, to a chorus of both cheers and boos. It’s not enough for the heckler, who shouts again to call for more, and suddenly, Prince Dimitri is very publicly, visibly uncomfortable.

Sylvain lays a hand on his prince’s shoulder, in a joking way, perhaps, but Prince Dimitri is having none of it. Finally, he storms away from the training grounds, adamantly refusing to even roll up his sleeves. No one else notices. Everyone else is busy watching Ingrid punching Sylvain. Maybe he asked her to take off her shirt, too.

Marianne also wears long sleeves in the hell of summer. But then again, she’s not fighting.

***

The days get shorter and the air gets colder and her healing magic gets stronger. Marianne fills in at the infirmary when she’s needed. It’s not a job she enjoys, but it’s a job she’s good at, and it’s frustrating how many people don’t realize there’s a difference.

Professor Byleth practically drags Prince Dimitri in by the arm. He’s bleeding from at least three different places and Marianne sets to work on fixing what’s broken, carefully, deliberately and impartial, as a good healer should be. He breathes in before lifting up his doublet, and Marianne waits patiently, and doesn’t flinch when she sees a jagged scar low on his stomach. She moves her hand down and Prince Dimitri grabs her wrist.

“Not that one,” he says quietly.

He directs her to the right place, and Marianne is nearly blushing, at her own incompetence, surely. Identifying an old scar as a fresh wound. No one else would make such a simple mistake.

Afterwards, she overhears Professor Manuela haranguing Professor Byleth for the heavy workload. She congratulates the new professor on making such a strong first impression at the Officer’s Academy: this year’s Blue Lions are on pace to surpass the record for total injuries incurred in a school year.

“Well, the mission ended up going wrong,” Professor Byleth admits.

“Every single mission you’ve done this year has gone wrong!” Professor Manuela points out. “First it was the rebellion, then that little dust-up in the Holy Mausoleum, then that monster business in the kingdom. I’m not _blaming_ you, not for things outside your control, but you have to admit—it’s uncanny how your class keeps finding its way into trouble. Are you sure your class isn’t cursed?”

That night, Marianne prays for victims of misfortune, both others and her own. She knows that she is a lost cause. It sickens her to know that others might be as well.

***

Professor Byleth extends her an offer to join the Blue Lions, and Marianne accepts. There’s something about the new professor that intrigues her, and the rest of the Blue Lion students swear up and down that their teacher is the greatest they’ve ever had. She’s cautious at first, but everything seems harmless enough, and quickly, she learns how to learn again.

The first thing she learns are terms of address. It’s not ‘Prince Dimitri,’ it’s just ‘Dimitri.’ And it’s not ‘Professor Byleth,’ it’s just ‘the professor,’ oddly enough. She gets used to her new class and bonds with them, unwittingly—it’s hard not to, with the collective feeling of being under attack together. Yet another mission goes awry, and they barely escape from the Death Knight with their lives.

The Blue Lions may be overtly cursed. It’s not like the beast that hides in her skin, ever lurking and waiting for the opportune moment to strike, but rather like a pack of wild dogs, surrounding them, constantly snapping at their heels, annoying them with injury after injury. Their wounds are minor, and they laugh them off. Marianne doesn’t laugh.

She has far too many opportunities to practice her healing magic. Dimitri staggers back to their encampment, and Dedue frantically unclasps his armor and shoves him into a lying position. Dimitri thrashes about, spreading his blood all over the bedroll, and Marianne stands over him, trying to recall proper procedure, yet she doesn’t hesitate. A good healer must not hesitate.

“Dimitri, you’re agitating the injury,” she decides. “I’m going to have to strip you.”

“No!” he grunts. “Heal me through my shirt.”

Marianne pauses. It’s far from sanitary, and the material will obstruct her healing magic, and his clothes are disgustingly damp with his own blood. But he is their leader, and he wants to be on his feet, and she cannot find it in herself to press the issue.

Dedue finds her after the battle is over.

“Thank you,” he says, pointlessly, “for helping His Highness.”

She knows exactly what he means.

***

Dimitri still laughs as he crushes men’s skulls, and his laughter is empty, eager, and it welcomes the suffering of war.

They’re given two weeks to evacuate, in theory. The battle starts long before that. Dimitri neglects all pretense of evacuation, of defending his people, and instead fights on the front lines, taking swords and magic and arrows for his own pleasure. The professor can only drag him away from the front line when he is too weakened to resist.

“Dimitri, don’t—”

Dimitri grits his teeth and pulls an arrow out of his shoulder.

“—pull the arrow out,” Marianne finishes.

“Fix me,” he demands, with insatiable hunger. “Fix me, you useless curate. While you dally, that wretched woman still stands. Every drop of blood she has spilled, I shall return unto her tenfold. The dead will not rest until her bones are scattered across every corner of this world, her heart impaled on my lance, her neck crushed by my hand.”

Marianne trembles, but proper procedure must be followed. “Take off your shirt. I need to inspect the wound.”

Dimitri rips off his blood-soaked gambeson, and Marianne gasps, falters, hesitates, all the things a healer should never do. It takes all of her willpower not to recoil, and Dimitri sneers at her.

“Oh, Goddess...” she whispers.

“Fix me, you wench!” he demands. “You observe the wages of survival. Horrific, is it not? The skin of my back, flayed from my bones, all due to her vile machinations. This body is mine, and equally not; merely scratched while others were slain. The scars I carry or bones I shatter are of no consequence; I am an instrument of the dead, and I shall carry out their will for so long as I live. _Fix me_.”

His back is impossibly scarred, lashes upon lashes crisscrossing over his shoulders and upper arms, stretching all the way beyond his flanks. Some are so deep that they are paradoxically raised, like brown, rough, twisting tree roots that bulge above his skin. There’s no place to start healing this massive web of pain, because there’s no place to _begin_. She picks a scar at random, brushing her fingers underneath a shoulder blade. Healing magic meets his flesh like teeth biting into a rock.

“Enough time has been wasted,” Dimitri snarls, and reaches for his armor.

“Dimitri, wait,” she says desperately. She places her hands on his shoulder to search for a hole made by an arrow, and finds many. The one losing the most blood is the one she focuses on. Dimitri lets her wipe a dirty towel over his shoulder, smearing the blood over his skin, before he pushes past her and throws his armor back on.

Her own skin tingles as she watches him march out, back toward the Empire, marching toward his certain death. Broken skin, for a broken man.

The onset of war is not an ideal place to have an epiphany, but the world suddenly makes sense.

**Author's Note:**

> So in my other fic, there was supposed to be a scene where Dimitri takes off his shirt, and Marianne sees all his scars, and just...gasps, out loud, because he has so many scars. That scene ended up getting deleted for a number of reasons (mostly, I couldn't think of an excuse for Dimitri to be shirtless) so here's the idea as a one-shot. I wrote this super fast, but idc.
> 
> Has anyone noticed that feral Dimitri is actually really eloquent? I expected him to be a growling beast man, but he actually speaks like he's in a play, or something. I suppose it makes sense, since he thinks that his family's ghosts are watching him. Or maybe being eloquent is his first language. I dunno.


End file.
